So windows phone 7 is not selling... solution! Reveal windows phone 8 due in a few months which won't run on any phone bought now.... so better not buy now!

I'm sure this is *really* going to help them sell those phones and gain some marketshare to improve on the nonexistant one they have now... but good news though! The hundreds of thousands of excellent windows phone 7.5 apps will work on windows phone 8....

It worked very well for desktop Windows - Microsoft writes the minimum requirements in order to force hardware manufacturers/OEMs to actually make powerful devices, because vendors want the MS sticker. The result is an upgrade in the product line. This time around, Microsoft is betting on two things that they had with the desktop monopoly that they certainly don't have in the mobile market:

1) Manufacturers will give a damn about supporting WP82) Consumers will give a damn about buying WP8

Yeah but when Apple stopped supporting PPC, they gave customers one additional version of OS X (Leopard) and two years notice for the transition after they announced their intention. Consumers who bought a WP7 phone are stuck until their contracts expire.

Because Balmer is fat and sweaty and touches himself at night. That's why.

Partly; yes; it's because their managment are idiots. But there's a deeper reason, and it's the reason why IBM took so long to release a decent PC in the first place and ended up having to buy in a system from MS. The are afraid of cannibalizing their main market. They want to "differentiate" from market to market. That means that the x86 tablet gets a stylus whilst the ARM tablets don't get access to tradiitional apps. That means that you will get a "Windows XX - Pro" edition which costs $2000 but is the only way to get some of the "power user" features.

When Apple came out with one phone which did everything for everybody, suddenly you could just add a rubber cover and use your business phone (which needed a calendar) for sport (where you need non-scratch glass). That destroyed a whole market which was used to providing separate phones for each different group of people. Microsoft wants to reinstate that kind of division. I expect the same success as IBM had in blocking the development of personal computers.

iOS also isn't running on a full fledged OSX core. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share the same core. If Apple were to announce that OSX and iOS now had the same core, they would have to do the exact same thing. This hurts WP7 users, but is great for developers. You can have an App seamlessly operate on all Windows platforms. That's Microsoft's bet, we'll see if it works. I think there is a good chance it will work.

You can buy a new phone even if you're on contract, so... what the hell are you smoking?

Oh, yeah, that's just fucking great. I just bought a brand new Lumia 900 that was marketed to hell and back as the second coming and now you are telling me it is obsolete before I even get the wrapper off and I should just buy something else?

MS is giving the equivalent of WP8 in WP7.8 (hence the naming)

And Windows Phone 8 apps won't be backward compatible to it. Pure slap in the face to those of us that actually believed the bs about the "beta test being over". Fucking bullshit. I guaran-goddamn-tee you that my next phone will be a Google Nexus device. Fuck Microsoft and the Nokia they rode in on.

Apple introduce a feature and immediately figure out a way to tell the world how that feature is useful

This is something Apple really does deserve a lot of credit for. When the iPhone launched, their commercials were essentially little 30 second tutorials on how to use the fucking thing. Same with the iPhone 4S - their commercials show people using Siri, creating a little tutorial on the commands you can use with Siri and what they do. Their ads are literally little user stories and tutorials on how to use the device and how it enhances your life.

So if you hand someone an iPhone, chances are, they'll know how to use it. Not because the interface is intuitive, but because they've seen a 30 second tutorial on it 50 thousand times.

As opposed to other companies' ads, which basically boast features like "higher megapixels than iPhone" and "you can take pictures while taking a video!" (That's a desired feature? I've never wanted to do that.) And while it's still a user story, the user in the ad I'm thinking of is skydiving, whereas Apple has Zooey Whatshername in her pajamas wandering around her house using her iPhone. One's a bit easier to relate to for most people.

The value of nokia is the brand name and its know-how. The engineer wont stay on a sinking ship and the one that do will get fired a few at a times each time nokia sinks a bit deeper.

Once the shares hits rock bottom, what exactly will MS buy ? A bunch of middle-manager remembering the good old times when they had the technical resource to build phone, or a brand that is only remembered in declining markets like feature phones ?

That being said, what is Nokia thinking ? They have basically written off all their current line up of phones, they are basically back to the same position they were 1 year ago, with phone running only dead system. I personally bought a Lumia 710 because as it could work as a GPS (downloadable map for free) and was very cheap. I actually thought that they had something with Windows phone, and was expecting WP8.

I can imagine how many updates the Nokia apps will receive in the following months... that is a big fuck you like not even Apple would dare.

Is probably just the switch to the NT kernel from a stripped (legacy removed) CE kernel. I hope the speed and stability carries through! It's so weird saying that about a Microsoft product but as anybody who has actually used WP7 knows, it's generally rock solid.

Switching to the NT kernel is what has enabled the multicore support and it probably also enables the use of any future x86 hardware platforms too. Obviously moving to NT also helps Microsoft unify their infrastructure because it means they only have 1 kernel to worry about (and mostly just the Metro framework).

Normally I'd be the first one to bash Microsoft about the whole WP8 not being on older devices thing, but since WP8 runs a completely different kernel it'd be foolish to expect them to support older devices which probably don't even have device drivers written for the NT kernel.